User talk:Gala.martin

Project news

• The project coordinator selection process is starting. We are aiming to elect nine coordinators to serve for the next six months; if you are interested in running, please sign up here by February 14!
• The contest department has completed its tenth month of competition, which saw an unprecedented 44 entries. The top scorer this month is Dreamafter, with 95 points, followed by Cla68, with 42 points, and Ed! and Woody, with 21 points each. Blnguyen remains the overall leader, with 182 points in total. All project members are encouraged to submit the articles they're working on as entries.
• A new auxiliary infobox, {{operational plan}}, is now available.
• A new page for military history essays has been created; project members are encouraged to post their own advice and opinions on matters within the project's purview.
• New guidelines concerning precision and ship pronouns have been added to the style guide.
• Featured picture candidates and picture peer reviews are now accessible through the project's review department.
• An effort to convert deprecated infoboxes has begun; any assistance is welcome!

Articles of note

New featured articles:

1. 1994 Black Hawk shootdown incident
2. Battle of Musa Qala
3. George Jones (RAAF officer)
4. Italian War of 1542–1546
5. Jim Bowie
6. Józef Piłsudski
7. Matanikau Offensive
8. Offa of Mercia
9. Suleiman the Magnificent
10. USS Illinois (BB-65)

New featured lists:

1. List of Knight's Cross recipients
2. Order of battle at the Glorious First of June

New A-Class articles:

1. 1960 South Vietnamese coup attempt
2. Cold War
3. Hans-Joachim Marseille
4. Krulak Mendenhall mission

Current proposals and discussions

• Discussion about top-level operational categories continues.
• A discussion about non-English operational codenames has begun.
• A category restructuring workshop is now open; brainstorming regarding the arrangement of the top-level military history categories is currently ongoing.

Awards and honors

• Bwmoll3 has been awarded the WikiChevrons with Oak Leaves in recognition of his superior contributions to a variety of articles about the United States Air Force, including a great number of those dealing with wings and installations.
• Bedford has been awarded the WikiChevrons with Oak Leaves in recognition of the outstanding contribution he has made to the project's organization by going above and beyond the call of duty in tagging, assessing, and classifying a massive number of articles during the 2007 assessment drive.

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Project news

• The fifth project coordinator election has now concluded. Roger Davies has been elected to serve as the project's Lead Coordinator, and Blnguyen, Eurocopter tigre, Kyriakos, LordAmeth, Nick Dowling, TomStar81, Wandalstouring, and Woody will occupy the eight Assistant Coordinator positions. Congratulations to the winners, and thank you to everyone who participated!
• In the simultaneous referendum on project organization, you voted almost unanimously for a primus inter pares structure. As a tangible reflection of this, Assistant Coordinators are now known as Coordinators.
• The contest department has completed its eleventh month of competition, which saw 10 entries. The top scorer this month is Dreamafter, with 28 points, followed by Smsarmad, with 13 points, with Blnguyen, Ed! and jwillbur also fielding entries. Blnguyen remains the overall leader, with 188 points in total. You are encouraged to submit articles you're working on as entries.
• The National militaries task force has been created.
• A new automatically-generated clean-up list is available to track articles that have various clean-up tags applied to them.
• A new logistics department has been created. The aim is to provide a pool of useful article creation skills that anyone can draw on. These include copy-editing, photograph retouching, and reference material sourcing. If you can contribute, please do so.

Articles of note

New featured articles:

1. 2007 United States Air Force nuclear weapons incident
2. Carlson's patrol
3. Coenwulf of Mercia
4. Glorious First of June
5. Koli Point action
6. Operation Camargue

New featured lists:

1. List of Victoria Cross recipients by nationality

New A-Class articles:

1. 51st Army (Soviet Union)
2. Indonesian occupation of East Timor (1975-1999)
3. Le Paradis massacre
4. Military of East Timor
5. USS Bridgeport (AD-10)

Breaking news

• A new B-Class Assessment Drive ("BCAD") will go operational no later than 11 March. Of great interest to experienced wiki-gnomes, it is small in scope, about 4,500 articles, and will be supported by the usual awards, including a golden wiki. To keep up to date with developments, and to get off to a flying start when it opens, add WP:MHA-BCAD now to your watchlist.

Awards and honors

• Kirill Lokshin has been awarded the WikiChevrons with Oak Leaves in recognition of his outstanding organizational work, his painstaking maintenance work, and his unstinting advice, throughout his two years of project leadership.
• MBK004 has been awarded the WikiChevrons with Oak Leaves in recognition of his outstanding effort to improve our compliment of naval ships by updating infoboxes, replacing deprecated infoboxes, and locating sources for ships in the employment of their respective countries' navies.

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Project news

• The Crusades task force has been created.
• The main project talk page is now automatically archived; MiszaBot II will archive any sections that have had no comments for 21 days.
• The contest department has completed its twelth month of competition, which saw 13 entries. The top scorer this month is Woody, with 22 points, followed by Dreamafter with 13 points, with Ed!, jwillbur, Redmarkviolinist and Borg Sphere also fielding entries. Blnguyen remains the overall leader, with 188 points in total. You are encouraged to submit articles you're working on as entries.
• A Sources section has been added to the Logistics department, for help tracing and locating JSTOR articles and other source material.
• A Linguistics section has been added to the Logistics department, for help with non-English language sources and translation of snippets. It supports 19 languages so far.
• An Administrators section has been added to the Logistics department, for help with admin related tasks. Administrators willing to help out are cordially asked to list their names in the section.
• Reminder: Editors are always needed to review various military history articles at all levels.

Articles of note

New featured articles:

1. Æthelred of Mercia
2. Cannon
3. HMAS Melbourne (R21)
4. Huldrych Zwingli
5. Timor Leste Defence Force
6. USS Bridgeport (AD-10)

New featured lists:

1. List of countries without armed forces
2. List of foreign recipients of the Knight's Cross
3. List of Medal of Honor recipients for the Battle of Iwo Jima
4. List of Victoria Cross recipients of the Royal Navy

New featured topics:

1. Atlantic campaign of May 1794

New A-Class articles:

1. Armia Krajowa
2. Heuschrecke 10
3. USS Siboney (ID-2999)
4. William Stacy

Awards and honors

• Kirill Lokshin has been appointed coordinator emeritus to reflect his on-going involvement in the project. The appointment ends concurrently with the other coordinators' terms in September 2008.
• The following editors have been awarded the Content Review Medal for their work on reviews at various levels of military history articles: Carom, Cam, Blnguyen, Howard C. Berkowitz, Kevin Myers, Maralia, MrPrada, SoLando, and Wandalstouring. Similar awards were made last December to: Buckshot06, Cla68, Eurocopter tigre, Hawkeye7, Ian Rose, Jackyd101, JKBrooks85, Kyriakos, LordAmeth, Nick Dowling, Roger Davies, The Land, TomStar81 and Woody, most of whom are still active reviewers.

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Project news

• Tag & Assess 2008 launched on 24 April and will run until 4 July. We have around 60,000 articles to check, so all assistance is very welcome. As usual, there are barnstars galore and service awards for contributing editors.
• The project scope has been amended to include specific reference to historically accurate video games. Songs and music with long military associations are also now included.
• The Contest department has completed its thirteenth month of competition, which saw 27 entries. The top scorer this month is Ed! with 37 points, followed by Cam with 22 points. Woody, Howard C. Berkowitz, Redmarkviolinist, Nousernamesleft and Outdawg also fielded entries. Blnguyen remains the overall leader, with 188 points in total. You are encouraged to submit articles you're working on as entries.
• The coordinators have "adopted" task forces to act as prime point of contact. A list of which coordinators have adopted which task forces is here.

Articles of note

New featured articles:

1. 1960 South Vietnamese coup attempt
2. 1962 South Vietnamese Independence Palace bombing
3. Lazare Ponticelli
4. Maximian
5. Peterloo Massacre
6. The Third of May 1808
7. USS Orizaba (ID-1536)
8. USS Siboney (ID-2999)

New featured lists:

1. List of Irish Victoria Cross recipients
2. Order of battle at the Battle of Tory Island

New featured portals:

1. Portal:American Civil War

New A-Class articles:

1. 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team (United States)
2. Battle of Bonchurch
3. Battle of Tassafaronga
4. Early thermal weapons
5. HMS Cardiff (D108)
6. USS Comfort (AH-3)
7. USS Orizaba (ID-1536)

Current proposals and discussions

• An interesting proposal to set up teams to deal with specific tasks, like taking the Top Ten most frequently read military history articles to featured articles status is here.
• The coordinators are exploring ways of developing and improving our fifty or so task forces. More information is here.
• All editors are invited to contribute to a discussion about the naming of military operations in an endeavor to reach consensus.

Awards and honors

• Congratulations and kudos to the four top-performing editors in BCAD: CAM (1st); Legotech (2nd); Harland1 (3rd) and Smsarmad (4th). They helped assess 4303 B-class Milhist articles. Well done!
• To belatedly commemorate the first anniversary of the Contest department, the overall annual winner, Blnguyen, has been awarded the Chevrons and the March monthly winner, Woody, and runner-up, Dreamafter, each receive the Writer's Barnstar.

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Project news

• Editors needed for Tag & Assess 2008. To coincide with the summer holidays, it will be gearing up from 15 June. As usual, barnstars galore!
• Partner peer reviews: for a thirty-day trial period, we'll be running joint peer reviews with Wikiproject Video Games. The idea is simple: we help with their reviews; they help with ours. This way both wikiprojects benefit from new reviewers and new ideas!
• We're notable: A new book, Simon Fowler's 2007 Guide to Military History on the Internet (UK:Pen & Sword, ISBN 9781844156061) rates Wikipedia as "the best general resource" for military research (p. 7). Of the military pages, he says: "The results are largely accurate and generally free of bias" (he also suggests people join the wikiproject). When rating WP as the No. 1 military site (p. 201) he says "Wikipedia is often criticised for its inaccuracy and bias, but in my experience the military history articles are spot on."
• A-Class reviews: the usual four-day review period may now be extended by up to three days (ie seven days in total) in the following circumstances:

1. the article has no opposes but has insufficient support for promotion or
2. the article's nominator requests more time to resolve matters arising during the review.

The full text is here.

• The special projects department has opened. It will focus on specific ad-hoc high-priority tasks and implement them with informal, short-term groups of editors.
• The Contest department has completed its fourteenth month of competition, which saw 16 entries. The top scorer this month is Cam with 21 points, followed by Redmarkviolinist with 11 points. Woody, Dreamafter, Kyriakos, Nousernamesleft and Outdawg also fielded entries. Blnguyen remains the overall leader, with 188 points in total. You are encouraged to submit articles you're working on as entries.

Articles of note

New featured articles:

1. Battle of Tassafaronga
2. Funerary Monument to Sir John Hawkwood
3. HMS Cardiff (D108)
4. Krulak Mendenhall mission
5. Le Quang Tung
6. Operation Passage to Freedom
7. Paul Nobuo Tatsuguchi

New featured lists:

1. List of Texan survivors of the Battle of the Alamo
2. List of Victoria Cross recipients of the Royal Navy
3. List of Victoria Cross recipients of the Indian Army

New A-Class articles:

1. Battle of the Kalka River
2. Battle of Verrières Ridge
3. Brian Horrocks
4. Byzantine navy
5. Erich Hartmann
6. Montana class battleship

Current proposals and discussions

• A discussion has been opened into the structuring of top level operational categories, starting with Category:World War II. All interested editors are invited to help establish a consensus.

Awards and honors

• Congratulations go to Hlj, who has been awarded the WikiChevrons with Oak Leaves in recognition of his many consistently fine and valuable contributions to military history articles within the American Civil War task force.

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